7 Responses

It could happen… I think that sooner or later it will happen. One of those inevitables that come with ripping apart your home planet and not having anyplace else to go. We’re a stupid species, and a vile one.

We see it right here in little old Falmouth, Mass., where a large contingent of voters wants to tear down our modest contribution to the fight against global warming, and pay several millions of tax dollars to do it.

That effort, Question 2 on next week’s town ballot, is about as stupid as it gets. Some of the people behind it always say think globally and act locally, but they obviously don’t see how that applies here. The only global effect of tearing down our two productive wind turbines will be to enhance the anti-renewable energy folks in the oil and gas biz, in addition to having us pay money to N-Star to power a facility that now sells clean energy back to N-Star.

Yeah, I’ve agreed with your letters to FalEnt all the way. But I think that what we have here is not species stupidity, particularly, but just the common garden variety of profound stupidity. Somehow people seem to think that we can handle the issues of global heating without inconveniencing anyone, without anyone paying a price. It’s as if the powers-that-be and the townspeople have decided that a global catastrophe isn’t really important in the scheme of things, that it won’t really affect Cape Cod, that it’s not really a problem. And as a corollary, the town PTB, as they stumble blindly from one huge mistake to another, seem convinced that the taxpayers should be happy to bail them out of their stupidity and ignorance and that no one should be held accountable.

Something that Valiela said some time ago about the whole sewer thing sticks with me. She said the committee tasked with planning to sewer the area has included in their plans provisions for a one to three foot rise in sea level this century and for a hundred-year storm. Utterly ignores that the three foot rise is way back in the rear view mirror of the climatologists and that her hundred-year storm is likely to occur every couple of months not too long from now.

The whole rationale about the estuaries strikes me as bogus. It won’t be long before their precious estuaries will belong to the Atlantic Ocean, very likely before the town might ever even finish a sewer, . Plus, did you see that front page pic in the FalEnt of Bourne’s Pond? Big old pond, little tiny opening to the sea. No wonder the damn thing is dying – the town choked it to death. I say open up three hundred yards of that beach between pond and ocean, get rid of the roadway, and never mind this nonsense about sewers for half a billion dollars to try to save something that is already lost to warming. Better to figure out how to protect the water lens from saltwater intrusion – or build a desalinization plant.

What’s next? A ten meter barrier around the town to keep the ocean out? Someone will propose that, likely someone with an in-law or a cousin in the barrier building business. Let’s see, seventy meters of rise, in the long run, versus a ten-meter wall. Somehow the math just doesn’t add up.

Frankly, I think the Cape is dead meat, in this century, not in some far-off future. Falmouth is going to sleep with fishes. That’s if we leave any fish alive in the sea, which seems unlikely.

Keep on storming, Richie. You’ve more patience about all this than I could ever dream of having.

You’re taking physics and biology way too personally. A virus doesn’t give a shit about who your friends and family are. It doesn’t give a damn about anything.

This stuff is coming down the road. Sooner or later something’s going to come out of the dark that humanity has created in the biosphere and it’s going to clean house. It’s probably going to be a witch’s brew of bioplagues, global warming, a dead ocean, and famine on a massive scale. And humanity did it. Ironic justice.

You want to blame me? Or the Greens (of which I am not one, by the way)? Go ahead, if it makes you happy and simplifies your thinking. While you’re pointing your finger at me, something’s going to come up behind you and tap you on the shoulder. And to suggest that I, or the Greens, are Communists says a lot about the shallowness of your thought on these matters.

It’s on a par with what one of our states did, North Carolina, I believe. They made it illegal to mention sea level rise in government documents and research studies and the like. Therefore, North Carolina will be one of those places where the sea never rises as Greenland and the Antarctic and glaciers worldwide melt.

Have a nice life. Try not to bother me any more. It doesn’t do you credit.